If you don't want your photos scanned, turn off iCloud. You can disagree about whether or not that's anti-consumer, but you cannot argue they are changing anything about your device or it's EULA (they are changing the EULA of a service).
Next will come scanning of your phone's content. "Hey, if you never send email or chat, the scanner never runs."
And keyboard logging. "For the children".
Encrypt end-to-end all you want, it doesn't matter if your device is running spyware.
We are in agreement.
It's a feature of Communication safety in Messages. This is opt-in.
The child protection part can be enabled for under 13s if they’re in a family account. If enabled messages app will try and detect adult images being sent and received and give a warning to the child, it can also let the parents know about it.
I don't know the details here, but you can disable iMessage and just send plain SMS, which in theory does not send the data to Apple. But then, part of the point of using iMessage is that the message contents are not sent to your carrier and have some encryption in place. I would guess your best bet is to find another phone manufacturer and use a different messaging service that provides better security if you want to opt out.
> It’s also worth pointing out that it’s a feature of the Messages app, not the iMessage service. For one thing, this means it applies to images sent or received via SMS, not just iMessage. But more importantly, it changes nothing about the end-to-end encryption inherent to the iMessage protocol. The image processing to detect sexually explicit images happens before (for sending) or after (for receiving) the endpoints. It seems like a good feature with few downsides. (The EFF disagrees.)
https://daringfireball.net/2021/08/apple_child_safety_initia...